India’s Biggest Battery Factory to Start Operating by October

Indian battery manufacturer Good Enough Energy plans to have its biggest battery gigafactory operational in October with an initial capacity of 7 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the company’s founder Akash Kaushik told Bloomberg in an interview published on Wednesday.  

The initial 7-GWh capacity is set to expand to 20 GWh by 2026, Kaushik told Bloomberg on the sidelines of an event in Delhi.    

Good Enough Energy will invest $54 million (4.5 billion Indian rupees) in the factory in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, the executive said.

Rising sales of electric scooters and vehicles and a surge in renewable energy installations are set to drive a jump in battery demand in India, and local firms are willing to pursue expansion to capture a share of the battery market.

Battery demand from electric vehicles (EV) is set to exceed demand for two- and three-wheelers by the end of this decade, according to Benchmark Minerals.

Coal, however, continues to be the largest source of power generation in India.

For the time being, “thermal has to coexist with renewables,” Good Enough Energy’s Kaushik told Bloomberg, adding that a solar-plus-battery system is much cheaper than thermal generation.

To meet surging power demand, India announced at the end of last year it would increase the size of its thermal power fleet by adding another 88 GW of new power capacity by early 2032—63% more than the plan that India published just months ago. Most of the new capacity will be coal-fired power, with gas-fired electricity generation unavailable to India due to the high cost of natural gas.  

Still, companies in India are working on battery technology and solutions.

Last year, India’s oil-to-telecoms conglomerate Reliance Industries presented a removable battery for energy storage that could be used for electric vehicles and for powering appliances via an inverter.  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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